Monthly Archives: May 2008

I was wondering if you have a special moment that embodies BBC bias? I have three that I wanted to share. The first was the absolutely depraved Question Time programme that followed the 9/11 slaughter. I’ll never forget the baying of that anti-American rabble in the audience even as the dead lay burning in the mangled debris of the twin towers. As most of us remained stunned as to what had happened the BBC’s biased audience showed its true colours. Then I recall the BBC’s coverage of the 1998 referendum on the Good Friday Agreement here in Northern Ireland and the broad smiles and backslapping from the news reporters when it became clear that the establishment side had won the day. All notion of impartiality was discarded on that infamous day. Finally, I recall Barbara Plett’s words as she recalled her impressions of Yasser Arafat”When the helicopter carrying the frail old man rose above his ruined compound, I started to cry.” Quite – weeping over the imminent demise of an aids-raddled mass murderer, the BBC incarnate. So, what were your defining moments?

. I don’t smoke – never have! But I defend the right of other people to smoke if that is a risk they wish to take – it’s called freedom of choice and it is a concept that sits uneasily with the BBC left wing intelligentsia . Take it’s enthusiastic reporting this morning of the proposals that government may ban vending machines, packets of ten and all branded logos from the front of packets of cigarettes. Not only that but government may also demand that retailers place cigarettes below the counter or in a locked cabinet. I listened to an interview on Today this morning with a spokesman for Independent retailers who made the fatal error of saying that he thought this “consultation” reeked of the Nanny State. You can imagine the chill from the BBC interviewer that greeted this observation. All his points concerning the impracticability of these draconian proposals were met with studied indifference – it is clear that the BBC fully supports the idea of more bans from the government. Why are there no interviews with Tobacco companies and those who gain employment from such enterprises? Why is there this all prevailing sense of “if it produces smoke, just ban it”? (Unless it’s illegal drugs producing the smoke of course, in which case it IS personal choice in Beebworld) To repeat, I do not advocate that anyone smokes but I do believe in the concept of personal choice. Given the BBC’s demand that we all pay it our money, I suppose choice is a dirty word for the BBC, maybe even dirtier than cigarettes?

. Do you think it possible that statistically speaking ALL of the in-mates at Guantanamo Bay are innocent little lambs? That is the line repeatedly peddled by the BBC and I listened and read the latest items concerning the squealing from “British” inmate Binyam Mohamed. Mohamed follows Al Queda training manual instructions and claims he was tortured. When he was captured by US forces, this cleaner from West London was travelling between Pakistan and Afghanistan, trying to resolve his .. ahem.. personal drug problems. As you do. His only crime was to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and now those pesky Yanks have gone and charged him with conspiring to commit terrorist offences in the US, including plotting to plant a so-called dirty bomb to spread radiation. Naturally the BBC immediately undermines this by stating that a previous AQ terrorist suspect in the shape of Jose Padilla got off when the same charges were made against him. It deliberately OMITS telling us that Padilla was convicted by a US jury of conspiring to fund Jihad and the killing of people overseas. More BBC deceptions folk, giving you half the story in order to try and convince you that poor doe-eyed Mohamed is innocent. It strikes me that the BBC just loves providing airtime to the parasitic left-wing lawyers for these Gitmo captives who can then use this bully pulpit to further blacken the reputation of the US military and Presidency. In the case of this illegal Ethiopian asylum seeker – now labelled as “British” as they come – the BBC is merely continuing its own war on the United States. Don’t you agree?

. It is article of faith for the BBC that terrorism is best defeated through dialogue with the terrorists. Through the prism of leftworld, the idea that you might want to defeat terrorism by wiping out terrorists is a non-starter, hence the crusade against the Bush doctrine. So you can understand the delight of the BBC when the man tipped to become the next head of the Metropolitan police, Sir Hugh Orde, argues that we should be talking to Al Queda. Sir Hugh is the Chief Constable of the PSNI here in Northern Ireland and delights in the fact that convicted IRA bombers and bank-robbers now sit on his policing board. I’m guessing that his idea of the future for London might be when those masterminds behind the 7/7 attacks can be brought in from the cold and given a job running London transport. Orde’s views resonate perfectly with the BBC’ s views which is why he gets to make these outrageously craven comments with not one word of criticism from any other source. Perhaps the BBC could have asked the next of kin of those poor people slaughtered by Jihadists on that fateful July day if they share Orde’s enthusiasm for parlaying with deranged killers.

Sorry to be so repetitive, and I’ll leave it after this for a while BUT I was outraged at the BBC’s reporting of Israeli reaction to Desmond Tutu’s UN sponsored visit to Gaza the other day. Having given that smirking South African clown the opportunity to demonise the Jews for their treatment of all those poor entirely innocent Palestinians, the Israeli government was allowed to respond and rightly (too kindly, I would add) suggested that Tutu had been “mislaid” by Hamas as to the nature of what is going on in Gaza. In many ways had it been left there, one could have said fair enough but the BBC was NOT prepared to leave it there and so this morning on the pro-Hamas Today programme around 6.55 we had an International Professor of Law interviewed who had accompanied Tutu on his grand tour of Hamasland and she was allowed to have another go at Israel, with the BBC interviewer helpfully bringing up the issue of “war crimes”. Naturally, this time round there was NO opportunity for an Israeli rebuttal. The BBC is determined to ensure that Tutu’s anti-Israeli spin prevails and this is what was driving this anti-Jewish agenda this morning. The complete lack of any discussion on the sheer savagery that drives Hamas – elected by the moral degenerates that live in Gaza – is blithely ignored at all times. Still the Jews deserve all they get – right? – and the BBC is here to make sure they get it. We talk about BBC bias here but in a way this is worse – it is the serial demonisation of a people by the British State broadcaster and it leaves me angry.

I don’t know whether the BBC will devote a report to the fact that May has been among the least violent of the Iraq war- it could be confirmed as the producing the lowest US casualty figures depending on events today and tomorrow. I don’t know if they’ll register that the six month figure for that is the lowest for any period since the fighting began in 2003 source. Iraq could be arriving at peace.

What I do know is that the BBC will report this against the backdrop of bad news, pre-announced bad news- covered in some depth. Somehow the BBC’s attitude for statistics tends only to work in selected directions.

Another day another BBC spin for “Palestinians”. I caught a “Today” story at 7.20am or so about the way in which Palestinian “collaborators” are badly treated by Israeli state. We got to hear several comments from one of these “collaborators” based in Sderot balanced by ONE SENTENCE from a Jewish inhabitant of that much bombed by Hamas city. Don’t you think the use of the word “collaborator” a bit odd by our ever-so-impartial BBC? It reeks of that much-feared judgementalism that Al-Beeb tries to avoid in most other circumstances and one would almost expect it to be the term of choice used by Hamas for those who betray its nasty little secrets. What’s wrong with the word “informers”? Is the BBC now reduced to using the Hamas terminology, just like it did the IRA terminology? Given that Sderot has suffered such a pounding from Palestinian rocket bombardment, it’s quite amazing to find the BBC nonetheless churning out these stories continually portraying Palestinians as the victims of Israeli ingratitude. Shame on them.

. Just watched the BBC Ten O’Clock News and was intrigued by the breaking news that there has been a fall out between the NHS and one of its primary IT suppliers Fujitsu. What really stunned me was the BBC assertion that “The estimated final overall cost of computerising the NHS in England is currently £12.7bn. While the NHS’s Connecting for Health programme has overrun, tough contracts have so far kept it broadly within budget.“ What? The alleged “tough contracts” have seen the cost of this IT farce jump from £2.3 billion to £6 billion, then £9 billion and currently £12.4 billion – it is by any standards MASSIVELY over-budget anfd with little prospect of attaining the time-scales promised by the NHS. I find it staggering that the BBC thinks it can get away with such unmitigated propagandising on behalf of the NHS. This is not just bias, it is lies.

Amnesty International is one of those organised hypocrisies to which the BBC swears fealty and so when Secretary General Irene “Gulag of our times”Khan decides to grace the State Broadcaster with an interview, you know that she is going to get an easy time. And so it was this morning, with her 7.25am interview on Today. Ostensibly there to chastise “the world” for its failure to meet the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, the conversation naturally turned to that great abuser of Human Rights – the United States and provided the fragrant Irene with an opportunity to once more call for the closure of Guantanamo Bay. To add emphasis, the BBC illustrate these global human rights abuses on its news page with a picture of..Zimbabwe? NO. China? No? Iran? No? Guantanamo? YES. Come to think of it, seeing as how UN peacekeepers are quite keen to gang-rape kids in foreign lands, wonder why the BBC didn’t ask Irene how she felt about the UN not meeting the UN’s Human Rights obligations? Must have slipped their mind, I guess….

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Say you’re an international organisation with a lot of skeletons in the closet. Say you know that your reputation will be damaged when news of these skeletons gradually filters into the public mind, as it must.

I suppose under such circumstances everything would come down to PR- you’d probably admit that bad news was going to come out and so suggest to a friendly party to conduct an “investigation” which would spread the blame nice and thinly, and then release the news through a friendly organ. It would be a little painless bloodletting, and then… back to work. The organ would probably begin its main article something like this:

“Children as young as six are being sexually abused by peacekeepers and aid workers, says a leading UK charity.

Children in post-conflict areas are being abused by the very people drafted into such zones to help look after them, says Save the Children.

After research in Ivory Coast, southern Sudan and Haiti, the charity proposed an international watchdog be set up.”

Sounds like a good idea. A watchdog. Sounds like a job for the UN- they’d be perfectly placed considering their clean hands and incorruptibility.

It’s the sheer arrogance of the BBC as much as its institutionalised bias that gets me. Take its’ reaction to the increasing rejection of the entirely politicised Eurovision Song contest by the British public. Now then, we all know that the Eurovision is a burlesque – always has been. But since the entry of the eastern European countries, “old Europe” has been essentially sidelined as the political bloc votes prevail and the UK has now no chance of winning, so why should we pay to go through this annual charade? Well the BBC has made is clear that it WILL continue to spend OUR money on this EU-driven enterprise and to hell with what the public thinks. The BBC is pandering to the EU and that is why it insists on funnelling money on this folly.

I’m sure you will all have noticed the blazing BBC headline “Israel has 15o nuclear weapons”. Or at least so says Hamas’s best pal and America’s worst ever President Dhimmi Carter. Carter is soooo on-message for Al Beeb, you can just see the Beeboids drooling when Carter gibbers that Israeli treatment of Palestinians is “one of the greatest human rights crimes on earth”. Any chance to bash the Jews, eh? When you consider the sympathetic hearing that the Mad Mullahs in Tehran get, the endless apologising for the Palestinian savages in Hamas, and the propagandising for Hezbollah, it’s no surprise that the anti-Semitic ravings of Carter get blown up to nuclear proportions by the BBC .

. When I blog these posts here, sometimes my critics accuse me of seeing bias where none exists. I do always try to write truthfully and call it as I see it, but acknowledge that like everyone else I am quite capable of error. That said, many of you who come here tend to see many of the same things I do, which is both re-assuring for me and evidence that there is no shortage of people very unhappy with how the BBC produces “news”. This Bank Holiday Monday morning, in an endurance exercise I managed to listen to almost one hour of the BBC’s prime news “Today” programme – and frankly it was an abomination. There were three items that really caught my attention;

Hillary Benn and George Monbiot participated in a debate on green taxation. Monbiot, who is an extreme environmentalist was there to criticise Benn for not agreeing to IMPOSE individual carbon footprint taxes on us all – to “save the planet” naturally – whilst Benn argued back that since the UK has been the first country in the world to shortly impose a mandatory legally bind Climate Change bill, we were still leading the way. I agree, the way to hell and back. The point is this; the debate here was between the uber moonbat left (Monbiot) and the barking left (Benn). Why was there no voice for those who challenge the entire AGW lunacy? The BBC has clearly adopted the Al Gore “the debate is over” mindset and merely now seeks out new and exciting ways to tax us in order that the Polar bears may swim free. On a lighter note, it was amusing to hear Hillary Benn say that “the time is not right” to punish us with individual carbon footprint allowances when WE all know that the only reason he says this is because Labour electoral fortunes are diminishing faster than the Arctic ice shelf!

Following on from this, there was a remarkable item celebrating 20 years of rap band Public Enemy and an interview with lead singer Chuck D. Now Chucky boy is a great admirer of the renowned anti-Semitic Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan and was allowed to have a go at Bush, Thatcher, the Queen et al. Apparently such has been the significance of Public Enemy that such mere details can be skimmed over in prime time interviews with but the most cursory reference. Chuck is a huge fan of Obama and can’t wait for “the changes” that President Obama will bring. I bet.

Finally, I listened to an interview with veteran Clinton bagman, Sidney Blumenthal being given free rein to shill for Hill! Blumenthal was allowed to attack the GOP whilst making the most outrageous claims for Hillary Clinton’s increasingly redundant Presidential campaign. How is it that the BBC could not find a US Republican to counter Blumenthal’s black propaganda?

After one hour of this dismal left-wing US bashing gangsta loving environmentalist drivel, I did the most important thing possible – and turned it off

It’s been quite interesting reading the lead stories in most of the Sunday press today concerning the alarming prospects for PM Gordon Brown and then comparing these with the BBC. With gloom and doom everywhere as tales emerge of plots and intrigues, Gordon Brown can at least gain small comfort in the re-assuring BBC headline that there is “No appetite to oust Brown as PM.” From Jabba the Hut (Prescott) to Postman Pat (Johnson), the BBC has helpfully provided a forum for those selected to calm Brown’s nerves. It looks to me that the BBC wants to see Brown survive, but only if he moves to the left.